Swedish Iconography of Drink-Bearer and Horse on the Northumbrian Franks Casket

Abstract The two-figure image of a drink-bearer facing a horse occupies the central space on the much debated right-side panel of the Franks Casket. This essay makes two claims about that dual image. First, the abundance of clearly female drink-bearers in early medieval English and Scandinavian texts and artifacts gives good reason to interpret the more ambiguous figure on the Franks Casket panel as also female and the hovering object before her as the drink she is meant to be bearing. The second and major claim, depending upon the first, is that the two-figure image carved on the whale-bone casket in Northumbria bears a close iconographic relationship to the image of a woman with a drinking horn facing a horse on memorial stones in Swedish Gotland. Moreover, the unusual feature of triquetrae between the horses’ legs in both locations strongly suggests that these separately imagined scenes on different types of artifacts refer to a shared, widely distributed and variably expressed, mortuary performance typically conducted by a female ritual specialist, a performance associated with a horse that implies a journey to the land of the dead. A brief exploration of the archaeology of buried horses and a real-world witness of a mortuary performance support this interpretation of the Franks Casket scene, and the addendum at the end provides further supportive literary texts and discussion.